[6.7.2] need creative ideas for dropbox sync

[ben37]

Alright, I need help. And a sanity check.

 

Here's my situation:

- Small team (3-4 people) working on content creation stuff in an office

- Had trouble in the past with dropbox sync on local machines, loosing data/overwriting newer changes

- Need to be able to easily share outside of our network to get stuff approved/reviewed by people outside

- ~3TB of stuff so far that needs to be accessible, growing ~0.5TB per year

- ALL of our data is currently ONLY in the dropbox (yes, it is what it is. I only joined ~1 year ago, and I'm cleaning up bit by bit)

- Ideally we will be able to work offsite with a small portion of the dropbox synced, that will sync back to the server. Not a necessary requirement though.

- We are using a dropbox business account for non-profits, and we have ~14TB of random crap on there, so we NEED selective sync, but everything I need is contained in a single top level folder

- Mac and PC mixed, but I'm fine with SMB

- Dell T320, 4TB parity, 2x2TB data, room for more , unRAID 6.7.2

- I am comfortable with terminal stuff and complex setups

 

My assumption was that I could use the dropbox docker and sync to the array locally.

This isn't working, bc dropbox dropped support for XFS. I tried manually updating the docker to the newer dropbox version, which allegedly reintroduced support for XFS, but that gave me the same error message about the filesystem being incompatible.

 

I tried using rclone, following SpaceInvaderOne's tutorial. I was able to access my dropbox, read from it, but I cannot write to the SMB share for whatever reason.

 

Otherwise, we could work with a solution that allows us to quickly sync only a small folder for exports/reviews, and have the full array backed up nightly/weekly in one direction to the dropbox.

 

 

Is there something out there that would satisfy my needs?

Is there hope for the native dropbox docker to work again?

Would that even make sense on such a large amount of data?

Or am I completely missing the point of something here?

[testdasi]

First and foremost, wouldn't it be easier to try to resolve your write issue with SMB instead since you have already got rclone setup and working for read?

I would imagine that beats trying to find an alternative solution.

 

Now, having read through your post a few times, your workflow doesn't make sense. Why would your team be working on files remotely (i.e. on Dropbox) if you guys are in an office (presumably the same office)?

Since you have Unraid, I would think it's faster for your team to directly access the data locally (even through Wifi, it should still be faster than Dropbox) and only use the cloud for external approval and/or and/or archival and/or backup and/or offsite work (for which data should still be downloaded locally before being worked on).

 

Just off the top of my head, I would suggest a workflow like this:

1. Client upload content to Dropbox "Inbound" folder
2. Rclone mount the dropbox Inbound folder
3. Regular script to copy data from Inbound to array
4. Team members work on data on array
5. Finished exports are copied to "Finished" share on array.
6. Used projects and content are moved to a "Archive" share on array.
7. Regular upload script to "Finished" share to "Finished" folder in Dropbox + "Archive" share to "Archive" folder in dropbox.
8. Client review / approval

 

[ben37]

Thanks for the reply!

 

The reason we need off-site access is because we sometimes have to work from home or another remote place. That doesn't happen very often though.

 

After some long and hard debates we settled on a workflow close to what you proposed.

We are going to work directly on the unraid array, using openVPN to access it remotely (speed should suffice in those cases), and use dropbox or even just gmail to communicate for reviews. We are a non profit organization, we shoot/design all our stuff by ourselves in the office, which means we can directly put it on to the array from our SD cards, and we upload to the destination from here too.

 

I was wondering if there is an easy setup to use dropbox to backup the array, instead of syncing it? Otherwise I was considering to use CrashPlan for an offsite backup.

 

Any ideas on this?

 

[testdasi]

rclone sync + bash script + CA User Script plugin